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NET NEUTRALITY Time magazine Person of the Year 2010

The readers voted for Julian Assange while the Editorial board for Mark Zuckerman.

Who knows what the editorial board’s reasoning was. One thing is for sure, it hangs around the division between the net neutrality/open data people and the rest.

Tim Berner-Lee

Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality

– The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending

Sci Am, 22 Nov 2010

says he doesn’t like social networks like Facebook because they ‘wall in data’.

Several threats to the Web’s universality have arisen recently. Cable television companies that sell Internet connectivity are considering whether to limit their Internet users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment. Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.

The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a URI. Connections among data exist only within a site. So the more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform—a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.

A related danger is that one social-networking site—or one search engine or one browser—gets so big that it becomes a monopoly, which tends to limit innovation. As has been the case since the Web began, continued grassroots innovation may be the best check and balance against any one company or government that tries to undermine universality. GnuSocial and Diaspora are projects on the Web that allow anyone to create their own social network from their own server, connecting to anyone on any other site. The Status.net project, which runs sites such as identi.ca, allows you to operate your own Twitter-like network without the Twitter-like centralization.

This guy, as an example, pretty much shows where the net un-neutral are coming from. Neutrality, and the rest, interferes with their business models.

 

Huffington Post 19 December 2010:

‘SNL’: Julian Assange Responds To Mark Zuckerberg Being Named ‘Person Of The Year’ (VIDEO)

You know your famous when an actor starts to do you on prime time TV.  The money quote:

“I give you private information on corporations for free and I’m a villain. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s ‘Man of the Year.'”